Outsouring The Mentoring Of Your Black Belts: Pro's, Con's and Cost

Companies are increasingly implementing Six Sigma programs throughout their organizations. This has created pressure to quickly train individuals and produce results. For the implementers and senior management team members, the challenge of quickly learning these methods and appropriately implementing them, while simultaneously keeping up with the daily needs of the business can be a formula for failure. Read on to understand what Six Sigma means and if mentoring of your black belts should be kept inside or outsourced.

(PRWEB) February 21, 2004 --Companies are increasingly implementing Six Sigma programs throughout their organizations to improve processes and better align with the needs of their customers. They are doing this with the ultimate objective of gaining additional business, maintaining the business they have and saving money. This has created pressure to quickly train individuals and produce results. For the implementers and senior management team members the challenges of quickly learning these methods and appropriately implementing them while keeping up with the daily needs of the business can be overwhelming and a formula for failure.

Putting things into perspective, what is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a set of statistical and management tools that can make leaps in improvement. When something reaches Six Sigma, it has a failure rate of 3.4 per million, or 99.99966% accuracy. However, being just 99.0% accurate can sometimes spell disaster. It means:

1. At least 200,000 wrong drug prescriptions each year.
2. Two (2) short or long landings at major airports each day.
3. 5,000 incorrect surgical procedures every week.
4. 20,000 lost articles of mail per hour.
5. No electricity for almost seven hours each month.
6. 50 dropped newborn babies each day.

Source: American Society for Quality

In addition to the above, Six Sigma is also a method for establishing metrics that align the organizations strategic goals and values to that of their customers needs and expectations.

According to Susan Pignataro, Principal and Founder, Advantage Business & Engineering Consulting,Not all processes in a business need to obtain the high goal of 99.99966% accuracy. An experienced employee or consultant understands how to go about helping companies determine which business processes would benefit most from improvement and focuses their efforts in that area."

As a point of reference, Black Belts are people trained in Six Sigma techniques and typically lead the improvement projects. These projects will usually include multiple people from various departments or divisions across an organization and save from $200,000 to over $1 million. In many cases projects will also include customers and/or suppliers. Master Black Belts, Project and Deployment Champions are typically senior level and management team members who are each responsible for various items throughout a Design For Six Sigma (DFSS) Project such as mentoring the Black Belts in the use of appropriate statistical and research tools, facilitating identification of projects and expected results and coaching Black Belts in removal of barriers.

This all sounds great. The struggle commences when the senior level employees are tasked with mentoring Black Belts and are also called upon simultaneously for other pressing departmental and corporate responsibilities. These other responsibilities can include multiple meetings and travel commitments, which take the mentor away from the office making their ability to mentor the black belts subpar. The Black Belts are then left to struggle, or worse, they stall out and dont know what to do at all. This is when project failure and costs mount rather than decrease. This failure is sometimes fast and recognizable, but many times it is a slow, expensive failure, because no one says anything due to fear that they will look like they are incapable.

There are many ways to handle Design For Six Sigma and Black Belt Project Mentoring roles. One is to assign or hire an employee to specifically perform these tasks. The other is to hire an experienced consultant.

In either situation, a requirement of the job must be for the mentor to have had extensive cross organizational black belt level project implementation experience at all organizational levels. He or she must also have regularly scheduled black belt team meetings where all can learn and share from one another, plus one-on-one meetings for specific more sensitive issues, inappropriate for a group setting.

Last, the organization must agree to not task the mentor with an abundance of other responsibilities. This will ensure that the mentor can pay close attention to the black belts, giving them superior guidance for those superior cost savings. This will ensure projects are completed properly, in a timely fashion and with solid learnings.

There will be a time when the Black Belt Program should be able to run without someone designated full-time in the role of mentor. The Black Belts and the organization in general will get to a point where they will be able to help and guide each other. When this occurs the mentor position will essentially go away" as a full time position.

Some companies are able to plan well and absorb these mentors/leaders into other areas of the organization and other companies dont plan at all, leaving the Master Black Belt, Mentor and/or Champion to find other employment on their own. Needless to say this creates stress and the unwillingness of other employees to take on such a role in the future.

To avoid the above and ensure an objective view of projects, another solution is to hire an experienced Six Sigma/Black Belt Consultant. The company can then permit their senior level employees to concentrate on core competencies, keeping them successful and competitive. After some key project successes, the consultant is eliminated, having left the organization with smarter Black Belts who can then mentor each other as well as newer Black Belts. The program is then easier to manage by a senior level manager who can simultaneously have other management obligations.

How do you determine the costs involved? According to Rob Ketchabaw in his article about outsourcing six-sigma training, "It is conservative to estimate that your Black Belt should be driving $500,000 per year in improvements." Therefore for every day the Black Belt is at a stand still, needed to train others or not available, that is $2000 the company has lost. The calculations are based on ($500,000/50 weeks)/5 days = $2000. This is conservative and does not take into account the work which may go undone at a senior level when a management team member is tasked with mentoring the black belts rather than concentrate on other needs of the organization.

In summary, whether an organization outsources or keeps black belt mentoring in-house a cost calculation should be completed prior to making any decisions. Paying between $2000-$2500/ day for experienced, dedicated, outsourced mentorship when implementing a Design For Six Sigma Program can yield a higher return on investment than utilizing senior management team members who were hired for other valuable organizational tasks.

Either way a solid mentor will reduce the learning curve and reduce the time for project completion. A consultant will usually also provide the added bonus of a broader range of experiences from many company types at a reduced overall cost to the organization.

About Advantage Consulting: It is a Silicon Valley based Engineering, Quality & Business Improvement Consulting Company started in 1992 by Susan Pignataro specializing in the semiconductor, medical and consumer product industries. Clients include Fortune 100 companies to Start-up and Medium Size Businesses.

For more information call 408-835-0794, write susanp@advconsultant.com or visit www.advconsultant.com ###